An obscure but great clip of SCTV in 1984 at YouTube.
Amazing how long Martin Short has been around....
And amazing how long people have been kicking Jerry Lewis around. Here he is, in a musical scene, in his prime, in the 1960 movie "The Bellboy":
I ran across that movie on The Criterion Channel the other day, and I've been watching it in bits. I like watching things that can be watched in bits, and "The Bellboy" is great for that. As the opening monologue explains, "There is no story and no plot. That's right, I said, no story and no plot. It is actually a series of silly sequences, or you might say it is a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut." Perfect for our times. It's almost TikTok.
Posts
28 comments:
I think Jerry Lewis is the butt of so many jokes because so much of his comedy was low-brow, silly.
But then there's the Jerry Lewis Telethon. This was a guy who didn't just wear a t-shirt on an awards show or spout nonsense into a microphone. He actually got out there and did something about the causes he cared about. He made personal, physical sacrifices for them.
Follow Ann for more tips on insulting the ancient die hard commies you graduated with in the 60's.
As a kid, I loved Lewis' solo films. No apologies.
There are a few Martin Short as Jerry Lewis videos out there and they're great. (He also did a couple of things with Lewis, which is nice as far as things to do on the stage can be for the people and the cameras and the clapping.)
Kills! Jerry sings Zimmy. Martin Short's SCTV stuff ranks up there with the very best
In "The Bellboy," Jerry plays a lowly bellboy, befuddled by various little things around the hotel, and he also plays Jerry Lewis, a big celebrity staying at the hotel. So he's both the cute little guy and the full-of-himself movie star. It's self-aware. Jerry wrote and directed it. I recommend pairing "The Bellboy" with "Mon Oncle," the Jacques Tati movie that is also on Criterion now. These movies are not just for the French. And both are very good watched one scene at a time. Possibly annoying if watched straight through. I say possibly because I didn't attempt that old-style form of watching from the days when people had to go to the theater to see a film.
The Day the Clown Cried stars Jerry Lewis as a clown imprisoned in a NAZI concenntration camp. He leads the children, Pied Piper style, into the gas chambers. Drama, not a comedy. You gotta admit, Jerry took risks.
I'm not gay yet, but that Dean Martin was something special.
Another one of Martin Short's great performances: As Attorney Nathan Thirm
https://youtu.be/b_5jZ3DbwoM?si=PPKyl6cKZISxnrSu&t=195
baghdadbob said...
The Day the Clown Cried stars Jerry Lewis as a clown imprisoned in a NAZI concenntration camp. He leads the children, Pied Piper style, into the gas chambers. Drama, not a comedy. You gotta admit, Jerry took risks.
Except he turned what could have been a very moving story into a Jerry Lewis moving by stuffing with long drawn out scenes of him doing his comedy bits. It's known as the absolute worst disaster of a movie ever made.
Sorry 'movie' not 'moving'.
When people kick Jerry Lewis, be sure to tell them, "Kick him some more. He deserves it."
Back in 1970 or so a Toronto theatre club put on a production of Godspell with a bunch of amateurs, intended to run for 10 performances. They got a couple of college buddies, Eugene Levy and Martin Short (Short intended to go into social work but Levy convinced him to try ShowBiz), a college girl from Michigan named Gilda Radner, and for musical director a piano bar guy named Paul Shaffer. It ran 444 performances.
I never was quite able to shake the feeling that Jerry Lewis hated himself for what Hollywood did to him.
So The Day The Clown Cried is basically Life Is Beautiful without fancy art-house marketing, and made by an actual Jew instead of a noble guilt-ridden goy? And Lewis had the decency to keep the thing locked up when he realized it didn't accomplish what he wanted? CC, JSM
"The Nutty Professor" is really good once you realize that Buddy Love is a vicious impersonation of his estranged comedy partner Dean Martin (I know Lewis always denied it, but I don't believe him).
The Tarrantino (and others) anthology film "Four Rooms" features Tim Roth clearly doing a Bellboy tribute. The movie is uneven (the Tarrantino and Rodriguez segments are way better than the other two), but Roth really commits to his Jerry Lewis persona.
The Bellboy is Lewis' smartest comedy, by far. It's arty, too, shot in black and white.
My top 4 Jerry Lewis movies...
Artists and Models
Way...Way Out
The Bellboy
The Nutty Professor
After that, it's a huge drop-off for me.
Jerry Lewis always swore that he wasn't doing Dean Martin in The Nutty Professor. That's because he skewers him! Not just Dino, but Sinatra, the rat pack, all the crooners and half of Las Vegas. He eviscerates the whole cool facade.
I watched this Rick Beato clip the other day. It compares the Grammys Song of the Year category for this year versus 1984. I post it here, because the 1984 presenters were Dylan and Wonder, which was just as remarkable as the music being compared.
SCTV satirized kitschy pop culture, but it was done in large part out of love. There was a "so bad it's good" aspect to Jerry, Dean, Sammy and the other midcentury acts. Also the SCTV cast may have recognized that they shared an exhibitionist, "drama kid" personality with the older entertainers.
Last week I mentioned Rick Moranis's Mel Tormé parody on SCTV. It was hilarious, but I see now that it was a Perry Como parody. Memory is like that. 40 years later, it's also not always easy to remember if Frank or Sammy was parodied on SCTV or SNL.
I just never got Jerry Lewis or his comedy, such as it was.
And maybe uniquely, when I watched him perform I never saw whatever character he was playing, I only saw Jerry Lewis. W.C. Fields was somewhat similar; he essentially played himself in his movies, except I easily accepted the fantasy that it was his character I was watching. I could never do that with Lewis.
The Death of Emmitt Till
"I didn't even know he was sick!"
That would get him so cancelled today lol
Liked the "Nutty Professor" - but not much else. Jerry Lewis comedy at the start was based on him being a crazy kid. Dean Martin was adult. Then lewis moved on making movies for Kids. Once he got too old, it was all over.
I remember liking the movies with Dino in the 50s. I don't remember ever liking any Jerry Lewis movies.
I liked SCTV a lot. I thought it a lot better than SNL, especially after the first 2-3 years of SNL when they lost Belushi, Morris, Ackroyd, Murray and got a bunch of mainly 2nd raters (IMO) I have the entire SCTV collection on DVD but no player to play them on.
John Henry
"'The Nutty Professor' is really good once you realize that Buddy Love is a vicious impersonation of his estranged comedy partner Dean Martin (I know Lewis always denied it, but I don't believe him)"
I believe him because Dino wasn't at all like that character. I think the Buddy was more of a sendup of the kind of dirtbag characters Lewis and Martin knew all too well from their many years working in nightclubs.
In a time where TV shows and movies usually change the scene every 10 seconds or so, it was interesting to see a single scene last for 4 minutes. I don't know if such a thing could happen today because attention spans are so short.
When I was a kid, I watched all the Jerry Lewis - Dean Martin movies. A lot of people didn't appreciate Jerry Lewis. I think this clip shows his genius.
I also loved Martin & Lewis movies when I was a kid. Perhaps what made Jerry Lewis so appealing to a kid makes him so annoying to an adult.........You can see more Jerry Lewis in Buddy Love than Dean Martin.
Age affects (or is it effects?) comics differently depending on their style of comedy. Someone like WC Fields of Groucho were unaffected by middle age. Their comic persona was that of middle aged men. Someone like Bob Newhart had the same thing.
But Lewis' comedy was based on being zany and childish. Or playing a character. That's why middle-aged Jerry Lewis was so unfunny. Dean Martin, on the other hand, kept being funny all the way to end.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.